Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary last season, and as it heads into the next half-century, it’s doing what many established entertainment entities are these days: looking online for fresh talent.
In the leadup to Season 51’s Oct. 4 premiere, several cast members have exited, including Heidi Gardner, Devon Walker, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim, and John Higgins, a key member of the Lonely Island-esque trio Please Don’t Destroy, who’ve spent the last four seasons of SNL making digital shorts, some of them successfully viral.
Comedian, actor, and writer Walker, who was on SNL for three years, announced his exit on Instagram, saying, “Me and the show did three years together, and sometimes it was really cool. Sometimes it was toxic as hell. But we made the most of what it was, even amidst all of the dysfunction. We made a fucked up lil family.”
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At the same time as cast members are announcing their departures, SNL is unveiling their replacements.
New members include Dropout regular Jeremy Culhane and Kill Tony regular Kam Patterson, along with Canadian actress and TikToker Veronika Slowikowska, Please Don’t Destroy member Ben Marshall, and Tommy Brennan, who worked at Cameo and LinkedIn before becoming a full-time stand-up comedian.
These announcements show us where entertainment–at least comedy entertainment–is looking to find its next stars. Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), has recovered from its near-shutdown under former owner IAC, thanks to CEO Sam Reich buying and leading it. It’s now a top YouTube media company, producing successful shows like Dimension 20 and Game Changer (which Culhane previously guest hosted).
Kill Tony, meanwhile, is an anti-woke-flavored stand-up show where aspiring comedians have 60 seconds to impress host Tony Hinchcliffe and a panel of comedy veterans. Its weekly episodes, filmed live in Austin, Texas, have regularly been some of the top-watched sponsored content on YouTube. Earlier this year, that attention nabbed it a three episode + one special deal with Netflix–which, of course, continues to comb YouTube for talent despite its CEO’s seemingly dim opinion of the platform.
Slowikowska, meanwhile, appeared in two seasons of fan-favorite creature feature What We Do in the Shadows, and has appeared in several Amazon Prime Video productions, but she’s also amassed ~700,000 followers on TikTok and has her own podcast, nevermind.
As is usual with SNL, it’s not giving out a lot of details about what these new, digital-born cast members will be up to ahead of the premiere. But we expect they’ll help draw in younger, internet-savvy viewers (folks are already abuzz on the Dropout subreddit), and maybe bring a punch of the absurdist humor us digital natives are known for.
